


something ugly, seeping, swirling

by orphan_account



Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians & Related Fandoms - All Media Types, The Heroes of Olympus - Rick Riordan
Genre: Angst, But not sexual, Drug Abuse, Eating Disorders, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Recreational Drug Use, Self-Harm, Self-Hatred, Underage Drug Use, Weight Gain, but its there, lots of triggers here this work is a vent fic so be warned, relationship isnt central
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-10
Updated: 2020-06-10
Packaged: 2021-03-03 21:07:02
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,664
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24642211
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: And this- this is his nature: addictive, obsessive, dependent, compulsive.Nico di Angelo has a problem that twists into another that twists into another that leaves him back in a hospital bed.
Relationships: Nico di Angelo/Will Solace
Comments: 7
Kudos: 87





	something ugly, seeping, swirling

**Author's Note:**

> serious trigger warnings for this work. the entire premise is about disordered eating and binging and underage drug abuse. there are mentions of self harm, vomiting, substance induced anxiety and maybe other things im forgetting. proceed with caution

For a long time, he doesn’t eat. 

After Bianca’s death, the empty feeling in his stomach is necessary, a reminder. He has a passing phase during the summer where he eats hundreds of dollars of McDonald’s a week (and maybe that’s just a hint of his problem, of his nature, just a little earlier) but it, eventually, passes. 

There is a war, and there is Percy Jackson who makes his stomach hurt the same way it does when it’s empty and growling, and there isn’t time to eat despite what others say, what others encourage.

(There are not many ‘others’, and soon, they forget anyway.)

He is not welcome at Camp Half Blood and he is not welcome at Camp Jupiter but this appearance is necessary, his father says, so he sits as the “ambassador” and nibbles on bread and feels the stares of the Romans on every inch of himself. 

Percy appears because- of course he does. Percy Jackson has wormed his way into every corner and every crevice of his life against his will and he can say nothing at all. Those two days it isn’t even metaphorical, or dramatized, he eats nothing. Not a bite.

He goes into Tartarus on an empty stomach.

The seeds make it worse, accustom him to this nature of not eating, this situation of having nothing. It makes it hard to eat anything at all once they’ve pulled him onto the Argo II, topped with everything else. 

Things get better, actually, when him and Reyna and Coach Hedge go on their mission. They have to be, if he’s going to pull through with them- if he’s going to keep them from dying.

And then… and then, things are normal again. He spends three days in the infirmary and makes a friend of his own accord. He eats the same amount that he did before, on the Argo II, but his new friend is the camp’s finest medic (he calls himself a doctor but he isn’t, not yet. He could be, though, if he set his mind to it.) and he looks at the skin that pulls over Nico’s sharp bones and his ribs that stick out far too much and every impression of his spine and says, _ you need to eat more. _

He… tries. But Nico doesn’t like most things. Meat doesn’t do him too well, and the textures of some of the food Camp Half Blood serves makes him cringe and his body react involuntarily. Eventually, Will gets fed up, and writes him a meal plan. Nico looks it over and thinks, _ I can’t do this I can’t do this _ and for some reason he is so deathly afraid of disappointing Will Solace that he doesn’t know what to do.

It’s a quick trip, in and out of Camp Half Blood to a bodega in New York City. He fishes around timidly, finds a bag of chips he remembers liking from when he and Reyna and Coach Hedge had stopped in Buford. He stands outside with his back against the brick wall, eating slowly.  _ Buford _ . He thinks of legions of zombies and a boy reduced to nothing- a boy he had killed and his stomach twists sickly and he-

Keeps eating.

He shoves his mouthful and tries to push back those incriminating thoughts. They don’t go away though, so he slips back inside the store and buys five more bags of hot cheetos and shadow travels into his cabin and eats until the feelings do go away and he dumps the trash on his floor and drifts asleep.

It doesn’t stop there. Eventually, his stomach begins to growl a little more, begins to react at the normal times of day people eat, so Nico drags himself into the mess hall and people stare and his friends join him and it's still so hard to eat with so many people watching and he feels disgusting but he does it, and whatever hunger is left he makes up for by overindulging himself.

It’s hard to balance it. He hates how he feels after he eats, sometimes it’s all he can do just to vomit it back up and not take the self-loathing any further. His mind is split in half: eat, don’t eat, eat, don’t eat, and the miss matched days of nothing and too much make him sick and achy but his body grabs on and stores as much of it as it can.

Will Solace smiles at him- so bright it makes him tremble, and he says  _ Nico I’m so proud of you _ , and  _ Nico look how good you’re doing _ when the weight on the scale slips up up up slowly. And Nico- Nico doesn’t question it. He smiles back and thinks he’s doing something right, for once. 

No one else questions it either. No one really stops and says, hey, Nico, it’s kind of strange that you’re gaining this much weight in such a short period of time because really all they can do is marvel at the fact that Nico’s gained much weight at all.

Jason looks at him over the table, one evening (it had been restricted before, but Chiron had been lenient, letting campers mingle around to different tables, as long as they obeyed their head councilor.) and says something like “you still don’t eat much, Nico,” and Nico frowns down at his plate of barely touched food.

“I eat at every meal,” he says back, a little harsher than he should, he knows, but who the hell made it Jason Grace’s business how much he should eat?

Piper smiles fondly at him, something she is wont to do and something he rarely returns. “He’s right,” she says to Jason, because they both know that he didn’t used to do this before. He’d come to dinner maybe, right after the war, and before that he would so rarely show up at the mess hall on the Argo II- even then, only to sit with Hazel, and rarely to eat. “Besides, he must be doing something right. You can see he’s put some meat on his bones.”

The comment- compliment?- makes him purse his lips. Sally Jackson had said something like that to him, once, just the other way around. _ Poor boy, we need to put some meat on those bones.  _ But when Percy’s mother had said it it hadn’t felt so bad. Hadn’t made his hands shake like this, hadn’t made his gut clench, hadn’t made him want to vomit up the little bit of dinner he’d eaten right there.

He thinks,  _ am I- do I- should I be eating less? _ Opens his mouth to ask it, even, but Piper and Jason have turned their attention back to each other, Jason seeming satisfied, and Nico stares down at his plate and pushes things around and only takes one more bite before the sun sets and everyone heads for the campfire.

He skips the campfire and makes a beeline for the toilet in the Hades cabin. 

Vomiting doesn’t feel good. Hurting himself doesn’t feel good. But it’s okay, because he needs to. He pulls through it easy because, how can it be hard, with everything else he’s gone through?

(This is nothing, he thinks, compared to one million tiny shards of black glass wedged into his fingers his hands his arms his knees his chest. This is nothing, he thinks, compared to fire down his throat and into his veins and the boiling blood of one million damned souls mingling with his own. This is nothing, he thinks, compared to the river calling, beckoning, and him only barely pulling away but still agreeing. This is nothing, he thinks, and retches into the toilet again.)

He goes to sleep after, but he wakes up around four in the morning with a gasp and reaches somewhere under his bed and tears through four different bags of chips before he slips back under.

It is ritual. It is routine. 

He keeps leaving once he’s back in his cabin to get more food, anything, not even to taste anything just to have something in his mouth or something to do with his fingers or something between his teeth while he stares at the wall. He keeps gaining weight and he keeps gaining weight and with his bomber jacket on and baggy jeans it looks like he’s finally filled out, like he’s finally grown into something, but in the mirror his muscles are fading replaced with something pudgier and he hates it but he can’t- can’t bring himself to care to do anything about it.

And this- this is his nature: addictive, obsessive, dependent, compulsive. His hands continue to shake badly and he stops showing up to the camp activities he’d only recently started to attend because he can’t keep his attention on anything anymore he’s so caught between starving or overfull and ashamed. 

Will notices, which surprises him. Will notices and he says, with soft eyes,  _ tell me what’s wrong _ ? And Nico can only get out the last part- the bit about not wanting to do anything but not being able to do anything anyway but wanting to do everything at once- and Will’s worried eyes clear in understanding.

He pulls Nico along with him to the Big House and he learns a bit more about the camp infirmary, learns that some things Chiron keeps heavily guarded from children, even children who’ve been through so much shit like they have ( _ because _ they’re children who’ve been through so much shit like they have), learns and is a little surprised that human medication works on demi-gods.

“Well, duh,” Will rolls his eyes with a smile, hand tight around an unlabeled pill bottle. “We are half mortal, death breath.”

“Don’t call me that,” Nico responds, but he’s staring at Will’s fist, at the orange tinted container. 

Will grins at him, then changes to serious-doctor-mode in a flash. “There’s a reason Chiron keeps this stuff under close watch. You can’t give it to anybody else for any reason, even if it’s someone who also takes it and they ran out. And you have to be careful when you take it, and you need to take it with a meal, and only take it once a day.”

“Okay,” Nico says. He can do that, he thinks. (That is yet to be seen.)

“I mean, I need it too, a lot of us do but I just-” he trails off for a moment, then looks at Nico in a way that makes him feel like he’s being inspected under a blacklight, like Will is sorting through every one of his flaws scrutinizingly. “Just promise me you’ll be safe, okay? And tell me if anything happens or you have any bad reactions to it or anything.”

“I promise,” Nico nods, and Will Solace passes him the bottle of Adderall. 

A lot of people at camp do take it, actually, Will hadn’t lied. Percy does, for one, and explains to him that they need it because of their ADHD. He says the same thing Will had, about taking it with meals, so Nico tries to eat a little more at breakfast to make it easier on himself. 

After a few weeks, he still doesn’t feel any different and he’s still eating too much and his dose gets bumped up to two a day. Nico wakes up too early one morning, two or three or four, and can already feel he’ll probably be asleep by the time normal breakfast hours do roll around, so he treats himself to a bag of gummy worms and takes his pills.

And like that, half asleep and stomach half full, it makes him feel nice. It makes him feel nice, and maybe two more couldn’t hurt and his hands are shaking again but it’s a good shaking and maybe-

By the time normal breakfast hours roll around, Nico is not asleep. He is still awake, and he’s waiting for Jason before he even arrives. He eats an entire plate of food, and Jason gawks at him, and Nico pulls more food off of his plate in response. 

(The immediate response when he’s back in his cabin is to throw it all back up, because even though now he wants food there’s something even harder in his bloodstream making him uncomfortable with anything he swallows.)

He eats and it comes back up. Sometimes it’s because he hates himself for eating so much, sometimes it’s because of the pills. His body holds on as tight as it can and in response to the unhealthy eating gains more weight and more weight but Nico isn’t even noticing at this point.

He needs something to do, he could do anything, he could do everything, and his head feels so light and he can’t stop grinning- real and happy, like it’s always been so hard for him to do. He wants- he needs- he finds the pocketknife somewhere, buried, he won’t remember, and he puts it to flesh like he’d promised Hazel he would never do again but it’s fine this time it’s fine because he’s not doing it because he wants to hurt, he’s doing it because it feels good and it makes his blood rush, and if it feels good it can’t be bad.

He keeps them just high enough to fit under his shirt sleeve, in case anyone ever manages to rip his bomber jacket off of him there will be nothing to see but things that were old and faded and he’ll have a second line of defense. Hazel won’t have to see, and no one will see and tell her. He’s guilty enough to know that even riddled with happiness this is something know one else can see.

The next time Will brings him into the infirmary just to check his weight- it’s been a while- he frowns deeply at the scale. Nico notices it, hyper aware of every move Will makes, but the meaning doesn’t connect in his head until Will says “Huh. Must be the Adderall. Maybe we should take you off it and try something else, if it’s giving you weight gain problems.”

Nico’s mouth goes dry and he says, too fast, “it works better than anything else I’ve ever had.” And Will squints at him but after a minute he smiles brightly at Nico and makes a joke about not skipping leg-day while on his new medicine.

His team wins at Capture the Flag four weeks in a row. He crawls his way like a monkey up and back down the climbing wall with the Hermes kids and jokes with Connor and Travis who he hasn’t spoken to for more than thirty seconds since he was ten. He listens- really listens when Jason talks and Piper and Frank and Annabeth and Percy, too. He talks back and he laughs even though he hates his laugh. Will hears it once, high and gross and like a hyena and he stares at Nico with his mouth half open which only makes Nico laugh harder, he feels so good. 

He cries uncontrollably under his blankets when he takes so many he runs out. He can’t get a refill for weeks now or someone will know something’s up. He’s already pulled the “lost them travelling between here and New Rome” with Chiron to get another month’s worth in his greasy hands. He can’t stand being around other people, can’t stand the noise that comes with people talking or the itch under his skin when people look at him even in passing. He screams at Jason in front of everybody and he doesn’t care when he looks hurt- revels in it, even. At night he tucks away and he cries and he eats and he eats but it does nothing to fill this new hole he’s drilled into himself.

He corners Percy one day when it becomes too much and he begs- it’s too obvious, they both know it’s too obvious, Nico’s eyes are bloodshot from crying and he’s been caving for a week now- but Nico needs those pills just one even one would be okay or maybe two or three or four would be better but-

Addictive. Obsessive. Dependent. Compulsive. He  _ needs _ -

Nico learns that Percy Jackson has a very hard time saying no to him. This is something he could have benefited from knowing before, when he was younger and hurt and- but that doesn’t matter, because it benefits him now and Percy pours a handful into Nico’s pale trembling fingers and tells him to make them last until he can get another refill.

He finishes the last of them on the fourth day.

He’s sitting with Will at the edge of the forest. They hang out a lot more now- Nico feels like he’s living three or four days packed into one compared to how his normal pace of living was before. Will’s talking about something his mom said to him, something about taking online pre-med classes in the spring so he can apply for college within the next year. He’d be able to take the classes from camp, he says as he scoots a little bit closer, if the Athena cabin could help him out a bit. 

_ We could hang out like this all year round _ , Will says, scooting closer still.  _ Just you and me, and you won’t have to run off to the underworld or whatever it is you do, death boy. _

Nico wants to say “don’t call me that” but instead Will keeps getting closer and his eyes widen and Will puts a hand on Nico’s arm and leans towards him and Nico’s heart is beating so fast and it-

Doesn’t.

Stop.

Whatever Will was going to do, he pauses at the face Nico is making. He feels like his heart is vibrating, like it’s some old broken motor that keeps sputtering aggressive and loud. It gets harder and louder in his ears and he gasps and he tries to breathe but there’s pain in his chest and he’s panting and his eyes are watering. 

“I-I-” Nico tries to speak, but he feels like his whole body is buzzing. 

“Nico!?” Will grabs his chin and leans in to inspect him. Not like whatever he was trying to do before, now serious and eyes shining with worry. “Nico, what’s wrong?”

“I can’t-” Nico gasps, grabs his left arm. “M-my heart- I-”

Will’s eyes stop on the way Nico clutches his arm like he’s in pain and freezes for half a second before his emergency medic side spurs to life. “Do you think you’re having a heart attack?” He asks Nico with darkening eyes and Nico has no idea what to say, he can barely breathe. 

Will lays him on his back quickly and pulls his jacket off of him. He slips his hands under Nico’s shirt and over his chest- first to use his power to diagnose the problem, and then to try and heal if he can. The thin “I’m working” line in his face slowly turns into a frown.

“You’re… not…” His eyebrows knit together. “You aren’t having a heart attack, Nico, you’re fine. Or, well, it’s just you panicking, but-”

Being told he’s panicking calms him down, somehow. He begins to feel his insides calm back down but outwardly he’s still shaking. Will’s face focuses harder and he pushes deeper against Nico, concentrating his power so much on him to search for the problem that Nico can feel it himself. 

Nico, for whatever reason, can’t take his wide, teary eyes off the blond boy above him. He can’t, so of course he doesn’t miss a single moment of the second Will’s face falls completely.

“Nico,” he says his name slowly, still hovering over him. Nico stares. “How many pills did you take?”

Like a wounded animal, Nico flails and tries to get away from him the moment the words are out of his mouth, but Will has him effectively pinned down. 

After a moment of sitting in complete fear, Nico remembers his strength and starts trying to push and kick Will off of him. The boy in question shouts out in pain and holds him down harder, screaming out for help. They’re not deep enough in the forest for Will’s voice to be missed because a few moments later Jason Grace and Kayla Knowles materialize behind Will.

Nico’s mind is too completely out of it now to process anything that they’re saying, too full of this animalistic  _ need _ to get out to escape, if he can get close enough to the shadows… but Will see’s the thought form on his face and pulls him back and the only thing Nico can think to do is lean forwards and bite him like a cornered dog but Jason properly restrains him and Kayla pulls an arrow from her back and stabs it into Nico’s palm and he’s out like a light.

He wakes to the white, unforgiving brightness of the infirmary against his eyelids, but forces himself to stay unmoving when he hears the voices around him. He has no idea what he’s doing here- can’t remember anything well at all.

The voices fade in and out around him and he almost slips back into sleep when he hears Percy Jackson say “it’s all my fault.”

A memory bubbles underneath Nico’s skin, and he fills with shame.

“Percy, no-” Piper’s unmistakable voice responds, but she’s cut off before she can finish. 

“You broke a rule,” a voice Nico recognizes as Will Solace after a moment says. “But it would have been worse if he stayed like how he was. I don’t know why I didn’t see it, when he started getting those mood swings but… quitting cold turkey like that seriously harmed him and it could have only gotten worse.”

“Worse than it already is?” Another, wet voice joins the conversation, and Nico sits up straight as a board.

“Hazel,” he breathes, and the girl in front of him gives herself a moment of shock at his sudden wake before she starts to cry into her hands.

There’s also Percy, Piper, and Will, which he already knew, but Jason and Kayla and Chiron are there as well, hovering silently around his bed. At the sight of him awake, the centaur frowns deeply and turns to Will, saying something about coming back to talk to Nico in a few hours. Nico doesn’t notice, though, focused completely on Hazel.

Her eyes are completely red, like she’s been crying for a long time. His first reaction is anger at himself, and then anger at the people around him for pulling her into this. She doesn’t deserve… 

She deserves better than him.

She’s staring at his side, and belatedly Nico realizes he’s shirtless and his arms are exposed. There are a few healing cuts against old gray ones on one arm, and on the other dozens of new red lines span over and against the werewolf scratches that crawl from his elbow up to his shoulder.

When she sees him glance at his own self-inflicted wounds, she audibly sobs.

Percy takes a hesitant step forward, visibly swallowing. “Nico, I- I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have… I should have realized something was wrong, and I shouldn’t have given you those pills.”

He wants to say  _ stop apologizing for things I did _ , or,  _ it isn’t your fault _ , but instead all that comes out is a colder than intended “ _ stop it _ ” and Percy’s face freezes and he looks like he’s about to cry over Nico’s body like it’s an open casket and Nico really can’t take that right now and turns away from him.

Above him Hazel looks at him- face torn halfway between looking like she’d just seen him kill himself and like she’s going to commit fratricide herself. Unable to face that either, he turns completely on his side.

He comes face to face with Jason, who’s frowning at him and also crying and Nico squeaks and covers his face with his arms and tries to keep himself from screaming at the top of his lungs for them all to get out and go away and leave him alone. 

“Nico…” Will looks down at him, conflicted. The stern voice he’d used with Percy has turned soft. “Why did you do this?”

The  _ you promised me _ goes unsaid.

When Nico doesn’t answer, still breathing hot against the inside of his elbows, there’s a shuffling of feet and Piper speaks instead.

“Nico-” She starts, and without even voicing a request Nico can feel the compulsion in her voice, the magic ready to crawl out and attack him and grab him and pull and he doesn’t want to say anything but he sure as hell would rather say it himself than against his will.

For fucking once he wants to be able to say something of his own accord, and not because of Reyna’s shared strength or Piper’s charmspeak or because a god is about to kill him if he doesn’t.

Nico pulls his arms away, ready to bark something cold and cruel at his group of onlookers, but he meets Will’s bright blue eyes, see the tears streaming down his face and the hand covering his mouth and he shatters.

“I-” He hates how his voice wobbles. He hates it, he hates it so much. “I don’t know how to eat.”

It sounds funny, when he says it outloud. Hilarious, even. But it isn’t funny, and he starts crying. What a fucking joke, huh? Nico di Angelo, can’t complete simple tasks, fucks everything up, ruins his relationships with everyone close to him.

The crying turns to hysteric sobbing and Hazel’s arms are on his back and she’s crying into his side, too, and he can’t bare to open his eyes and look at anyone else, gauge any of their reactions at his stupid fucking pity-party.

He calms down, eventually, and by then there’s no one else there but Hazel and Jason and Will.

Will is sitting at his side, while Jason and Hazel sit pressed up against each other a bit away, talking in hushed voices accompanied by Hazel’s occasional sniffles. The son of Apollo pulls his most damaged arm out to it’s full wingspan while Nico watches numbly. 

He puts his fingers against Nico’s scars and involuntarily he shivers and struggles a bit. The marks are healing though, but they don’t go completely away. Not that Nico had expected them to- they were wounds created with a mortal weapon, they couldn’t be completely healed by magic.

Will opens Nico’s fist up with his hands and interlocks their fingers. Nico blinks in surprise, but Will doesn’t meet his eyes.

Will looks over his body for more scars after he heals his other arm with his free hand and pauses to frown at Nico’s bare stomach, at the pinched skin in different places where the skin had used to pull tightly over his bones, at the stretch marks in awkward and uneven places, at the purpley-paleness of his body.

“I know,” Nico says shakily, tries to huff a laugh but it comes out strangled. “It’s disgusting.”

Will’s eyes dart to meet his instantly, and for a long moment he just stares at Nico.

“You aren’t,” he says, once it’s been long enough that Nico’s aching brain has forgotten what he’d even said. 

“What?” Nico asks.

“You aren’t disgusting.”

Something deep in Nico’s gut twists at that- skeletal little butterflies that would be cute in concept, maybe, but are actually eating his skin alive and making the acid churn in his stomach. 

“I am,” he whispers. “I am, I-”

“Would you just-” Will says, louder now, loud enough to make Nico flinch. The blond pulls his hand out of Nico’s and puts his face into his elbow and makes a noise somewhere between a laugh and a sob. “Would you just stop?”

Nico stares, and keeps completely silent. Will is gripping the hospital bed with his other hand tight enough that his knuckles are white and shaking. Nico’s done it again, run someone else away, and Will is never going to look at him the same again and it’s all his fault.

“I don’t,” Hazel says, just loud enough to be heard. “I don’t understand why you do this to yourself.”

Nico laughs, bitter, and scrubs at his face. “You and me both.”

The tenseness in the room rises.

“You should see a therapist,” Jason suggests, and Nico is so so tired of Jason Grace and his fucking suggestions.

“A therapist,” Nico repeats. “You could just say I should be put in a fucking asylum.”

“Nico don’t _ say that _ ,” Hazel pulls on her hair in stress and Nico locks back up in guilt.

“We’re trying to help you,” Will says, barely lifting his head up. Nico wishes that he would let his hand drift back towards his and just forget about all of this. “You- I brought you in here just thinking you were high off your mind but you’ve been abusing for  _ months.  _ And then we go to check your heart and you’ve got all these- these wounds you gave  _ yourself  _ and then you tell us you have an eating disorder and-”

Will Solace looks up at him.

“What do you expect us to do, Nico?”

_ Leave _ , he thinks. _ Like everyone else. Leave me alone, leave me to rot, let me go so far I kill myself and never think about me again. That would be better. If you leave you won’t have to deal with this, won’t have to feel like this, and you won’t have to care about what it does to me when you go. _

“You should see a therapist,” Will repeats, and Nico falls back against the bed pillow and tries not to start crying again.

They sit in silence for a long time. Eventually, Jason drifts away and Hazel scoots closer to rest her head on Nico’s stomach. Will’s anger has diminished somewhat, and his hand has come back to meet Nico’s own, clenching it tightly and not letting up for so long Nico feels his hand numbing.

He gives himself enough time to make a plan, to let go of his personal feelings and think, and he starts whispering to Nico from where his chin rests on the bed railing. 

“You’re going to have to stay on the meds,” he says, and something in Nico instantly jolts in betraying excitement. Will catches it all too easily and his face turns sad. “You won’t get to have them yourself. You’ll have to get them administered by Chiron everyday… probably for two or three weeks with more space in between each one until we can get you down to the point where you aren’t suffering any panic attacks or mood swings…”

“What about…” Nico pauses. He can tell that Hazel isn’t asleep against him, listening intently. His voice feels tight in his throat. “The eating.”

“We can try that meal plan again,” Will suggests, and Nico frowns.

“I can’t… eat a lot of that stuff,” he confesses.

“You’re allergic to something?” Will raises his head, eyes instantly looking for his patient file. Nico feels the smallest smile tug at his lips at the sight. 

“No,” he says. “The… textures of stuff. The way it feels I just can’t… there’s only certain things I can make myself eat.”

It feels embarrassing to say out loud, just another something wrong with him, but he doesn’t actually expect Will to laugh. Will laughs and Nico wriggles uncomfortably and he laughs and he laughs until he’s crying again.

“Why didn’t you just tell me that before all of this started?” Will asks through tears. “We could have tailored something better to you.”

Nico stays quiet.

“Nico…”

“What about the weight?” He asks, and feels Hazel tense against him. He really has gained a lot- too much for a demigod certainly. Will makes a face Nico can’t quite read.

“I don’t know how much you’ll be able to lose,” he answers honestly. “With the way you were treating your body before and after it’ll probably be harder to lose or gain weight after this. You’ll just have to keep up with your training and see what happens.”

“I don’t want-”

“You look fine, Nico,” Will cuts him off, and Nico leaves his mouth hanging open. “It doesn’t matter how big you are, as long as we can get you eating normal. There’s nothing wrong with the weight you have on you, and there wouldn’t be anything wrong if you were bigger either.”

Nico swallows

“... so we can do all of that with meal plans, we might have to do some trials to see what things you can stand eating, though… and Chiron will probably have you looked over every week for a few months until we’re sure you won’t hurt yourself again… we’ve had to do that with a few other campers. He probably  _ will _ want you to see a therapist, and put you on an antidepressant… I don’t know how well an SSRI would work for you really but I don’t think anyone would be comfortable putting you on another-”

He lets Will keep talking about medical things, lets him decide exactly what to do with Nico. It feels good, almost, the idea of having something  _ exact _ to do and follow. No uncertainties. He begins to drift off, Will still whispering at his side and Hazel still softly sniffling against his stomach.

Later Chiron will come in and kick Hazel and Will out and they’ll have a long, long talk about Bianca and Percy and being alone in labyrinths and being alone at Camp Jupiter and being alone in Tartarus. Days will get a little brighter until they get dark again, never in between, but there are people who will keep an eye on him now, no matter how uncomfortable that will make him.

It will come, but for now, he sleeps.


End file.
